Male spiders that treat some females as meals instead of mates may be expressing their preference for younger partners.

“Normally male spiders are viewed as active, let’s say, nondiscriminatory machines that are trying to copulate with every female they encounter,” says Lenka Sentenská of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. But that’s not the case for the small spider Micaria sociabilis, she and colleague Stanislav Pekár report in an upcoming Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. “We ...